Buckwheat in the home garden

Buckwheat in the home garden? I think it's a great idea. It's true that producing a significant amount of buckwheat groats or flour at home is a challenge -- see the Milling and grinding page on this site -- but you can certainly grow enough to turn some of your harvest into flour in a coffee mill. I love buckwheat, but I tend to add the flour to other flours or into boxed pancake mix anyway, so I don't need buckets of the stuff for a two-person household.

Besides the pointy black seeds from the buckwheat plant, which I used both as flour and as new seed for the next crop, I get a lot of benefit from the green stems and leaves and white blossoms of the buckwheat plants. They not only earn the space i allot them, they also help the rest of my garden grow.

Buckwheat's shining quality to me? It doesn't creep out of its own space, which makes it wonderful for landscaping and for use between rows of other crops. I can plant it around the edges of garden beds and even among the plants. It makes a great mulch, one which grows vertically out of the garden space, rather than something like straw laid down on the surface.

Buckwheat plants in the garden bring all the benefits of the best mulch. A good mulch holds the soil together so that rain and wind don't carry valuable soil and nutrients down grades and away from the garden bed. Mulch should prevent the sun from overheating the soil and evaporating moisture from rain or watering before the water can get down into the roots where the garden plants can "drink" it. And a worthwhile mulch suppresses weeds, which is where buckwheat does an especially good job. 

Farmers with significant acreage have known this for a long time, which is why buckwheat is one of the most popular cover crops. Check out this article about how buckwheat's quick growth makes it a wonderful weed suppressor.

Buckwheat grows in poor-quality soil, and nutrient-poor soil is where weeds thrive. The area in the photo above was all sand and weeds. i ripped out the problem plants and tossed around several handfuls of buckwheat. 

The kernels, sowed somewhat thickly, will crowd out bluegrass, ryegrass, crabgrass, and broadleaf weeds, with stems so close together than the weeds never get a good foothold in the garden.

While a healthy garden bed needs mulch at the surface, it also needs compost down in the soil to provide bulk in sandy soil, to break up clay soil, and to supply nutrients. When there's limited access to green material for the compost bin, buckwheat leaves are a great resource. 

Here in coastal New England, for example, we don't have lush lawns to provide grass clippings. We can walk to the beach, but the skimpy beach grass on our lawn is rooted in sand. 

Along the Maine coast, the 'lawn" looks like this.

Good compost needs layers of brown stuff for carbon and layers of green stuff for nitrogen. 

http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/earthkind/landscape/dont-bag-it/chapter-2-composting-fundamentals/

Buckwheat plants do their job as living mulch, and then at the end of their growing cycle, they can be pulled up easily and added on top of leaves of shredded cardboard to make a nitrogen-rich green layer.

Buckwheat is more stalk that leaf, so in terms of bulk, each individual plant doesn't make a lot of green matter. One gets the volume through the number of plants, since buckwheat grows very quickly. Without pushing the schedule, this is a plant can be double-cropped. Plant it early in the season, harvest it, and re-plant buckwheat seed for a second crop in the same soil bed. It can also be sown thickly, so while each plant doesn't make many leaves, you can harvest many plants. The green pile of plants you pull up in just a few minutes can be impressive. 

Buckwheat is both convenient and a great value as both mulch and compost. Once you've purchased enough unhulled buckwheat kernels to sow the number of plants you need, the crop is self-renewing. If you have enough space, you can just let the kernels fall on the ground where the current crop grows, and many of the pointed black grains will sprout again in the spring. I personally change up my garden beds, so I gather the hard black kernels in something like a large plastic Tupperware container to sow in a new spot in the spring. Each plant will produce a number of kernels, so your supply of new seed multiplies itself. And you don't have to heave bags of compost or mulch into your car or truck and drive them to your house and lug the materials to the garden space. Your mulch is growing right there in the garden space and then the green compost is gathered very easily and tossed onto the maturing pile. 

Ready for the pile!